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Idris Elba is wired for sound

He’s the Hackney boy who made it big in Hollywood, starring in Prometheus and Thor and hand-picked to play Nelson Mandela. But what Idris Elba wants more than anything is to get you dancing. Dan Jones meets the A-list actor with music in his soul

Idris Elba is looking for a photograph. ‘It’s where my love affair with music started,’ he says. But despite a thorough scour of the smart Portobello townhouse he’s renting, the photo is nowhere to be found.

He looks momentarily disappointed before settling back on his seat, taking a draw on a roll-up and letting his mind’s eye do the work. ‘I’m in dungarees, white T-shirt, four years old with a little Afro,’ he says. ‘I’m wearing African beads around my neck and I’m holding Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On album, walking towards the turntables with my dad. Wicked shot. When I look back on it I remember being fascinated by the whole process of music.’

Music? Yep, music. For I am sitting in Elba’s garden on a chilly January afternoon to meet the man in his lesser-known guise: Driis, aka DJ Driis, aka Big Driis the Londoner (this last one is reserved for when he’s performing in America and they need things spelled out for them). He is a seasoned recording artist; a semi-professional DJ of nearly three decades’ standing; a muse and collaborator with everyone from Mumford & Sons and The Milk, to Jay-Z and Usher. Big Driis is generally better known for his acting than his music, but it’s not impossible that one day that could change.

It’s fair to say that, even as an actor, Elba has a wide constituency: to the boxset-heads he will ever be Stringer Bell, the dapper drug baron with the mind of a venture capitalist, from HBO’s cult cops ’n’ dealers series The Wire; to more conventional crime fans he is the black-souled Detective Chief Inspector John Luther of the eponymous BBC drama (for which he won a Golden Globe in 2012). He has played for laughs in the American version of The Office; he has sci-fi groupies thanks to supporting roles in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Kenneth Branagh’s Thor franchise, which has just wrapped its second instalment; and later this year he takes on perhaps his biggest and certainly his most involving role of all, playing Nelson Mandela in the biopic Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom, a role for which he was handpicked by the former South African president’s family and which he calls ‘the deepest piece of expression I’ve ever done’.

He has a rich, deep voice, a London twang rounded by years spent in the States. He is friendly, immediately disarming and a terrifically generous host. The Portobello house is homely rather than flash (officially he lives in Atlanta, close to his ex-wife and daughter, but describes himself as a ‘nomad’). The only problem, he says, is that weekends get a bit touristy — he is frequently recognised within minutes of leaving his front door. As we sit chatting, his kitchen fills with friends, gathered around the breakfast bar, laughing.

Music remains his first love and tonight he begins a seven-week residency on the decks at Love & Liquor, a club on Kilburn High Road modelled loosely on a dive bar in Williamsburg, New York (think exposed brickwork, deep booths and taxidermy).

Why break from an acting career that is going stratospheric to mess around in a club? Simple answer: because life is good, and he can. ‘I’ve had an amazing year — an amazing seven years, really — and I want to celebrate,’ he says. ‘I want to DJ at home, in London… the truthful, honest way to celebrate is to get on the turntables and have a party.’

Idrissa Akuna Elba was born in 1972, to Winston, from Sierra Leone, and Eve, from Ghana. An only child, he grew up in Hackney, where he was a student at Queensbridge Primary School. He has happy memories of life in the East End. ‘What I remember is the summertime... Hackney was a warm, carefree place.’ He played football in the streets while his dad hustled at pool in the Middleton Arms, a pub near London Fields long since demolished and replaced by an apartment block. ‘I’d run across the road to get some crisps — and because they loved my dad, they loved me.’ He’d come back laden with enough for the whole team.

His parents infused him with a love of music — everything from reggae, soul and the synthesised sounds of the 1980s, to music with a deeper cultural heritage. ‘They just loved to listen to music from their home,’ he says. ‘Not necessarily from Sierra Leone or Ghana but from the African diaspora. So you had Congolese music from OK Jazz, Franco, Tabu Ley Rochereau — at the time that Congo sound was very much similar to salsa or rumba or cha-cha. It would transform my mum and dad’s home, this little apartment in Hackney, into this cultural…’ He pauses. ‘You know, you’re on the ninth floor looking out and you’re hearing this African music and you could be anywhere.’

Aged 14, he started helping out an uncle who was a DJ, travelling around to weddings, eventually being allowed to take over basic mixing duties while his uncle was making moves on the dancefloor (the first song he dropped was ‘Hot Hot Hot’ by Arrow, a guaranteed dancefloor filler in the early 1980s). Soon afterwards he and a friend, Boogie, who is still his DJ partner 25 years on, landed a pair of turntables when his school closed its music department and sold off all the equipment. By the age of 16, he and Boogie had started a sound system known as Social Affair. Not long afterwards he had a slot on Climax FM, a pirate radio station. His DJ name was Mr Kipling. Why? ‘Because I played an exceedingly good tune. Ha ha ha ha ha!’

At the same time he was also becoming interested in drama, spurred on by a teacher and inspired by Saturday morning visits to the cinema. A grant of £1,500 from the Prince’s Trust got him into the National Youth Music Theatre, and he toured Japan with a production of Guys and Dolls. His first appearance on UK television was in a Crimewatch reconstruction. As well as DJing, he worked night shifts at Dagenham’s Ford factory to help pay the bills in between jobs. Eventually, in 1998, he sold his London home and moved to New York with his then wife, Dormowa Sherman, to try to launch an American screen career.

It was his appearance as Achilles in Peter Hall’s off-Broadway production of Troilus and Cressida that won him his audition for The Wire (during which he did not reveal that he was British) and in 2002, on the day that his daughter Isan was born, he discovered he had won the part of Stringer Bell.

And that, for a while, was that. Elba appeared in The Wire from its inception in 2002 until he was written out in 2004. A tiny shard of his career, maybe, but without doubt an important one. The demise of Stringer Bell remains the show’s most famous scene. Thanks to the slow-burn popularity of The Wire, Elba will probably remain associated with Bell for a good while yet, just like his British co-star Dominic West, who for many fans will always be Detective Jimmy McNulty. Strange, because in the decade since The Wire, Elba’s screen career has outstripped that of every other member of the cast. As well as Mandela, this year will also see him appear in Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro’s aliens-vs-machines thriller, and Thor: The Dark World as the god Heimdall. He has also directed his first TV drama, Pavement Psychologist, for Sky Arts, starring Anna Friel, about a pair of accountants whose lives are thrown into turmoil after they encounter a homeless man, and aims to direct a feature film later this year.

Meanwhile, besides the increasingly weighty film roles, Elba seems quietly to be creeping towards national treasure status. Witness his appearance at December’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards ceremony, to perform Edgar Albert Guest’s poem ‘It Couldn’t Be Done’ in tribute to Team GB and Paralympic GB’s performances at London 2012. And there has been a gathering international internet campaign to crown him the next James Bond — if you consider that it was once Will Smith who was touted as the potential first black Bond, you get an idea of how high Elba’s stock in Hollywood currently stands.

He is admired across the board. I asked his collaborator in Thor, Tom Hiddleston (who plays the villain Loki), to sum up Elba in a couple of sentences. ‘Idris is truly a gentleman and an exceptionally diligent, creative man,’ he said. ‘He wears it all like a loose garment.’ Elba guffaws when I tell him that. ‘That’s a wicked compliment,’ he says. ‘But I guess I’m lucky. I have a bit of credibility that allows me moments when I’m working with geniuses in their field. Collaborating with Jay-Z. With Angie Stone [Elba directed a music video for the American R&B star]. Even with those kids The Milk. Great band. I was shooting Ghost Rider 2 when The Milk sent me a song, and I ended up doing this spoken word thing. The Nextmen [UK hip-hops legends] produced that song. The fact that I was recognised by them…’ He tails off.

Is there a risk that in attempting to expand his career in this new direction he will be dismissed as just another actor who thinks they can be a music star? I put it to Elba that the present cultural world tends to like people to be in neat creative boxes, rather than expanding into too many different areas. We don’t like Renaissance men. But that doesn’t worry him too much. ‘Ultimately, from my perspective, it all comes from the same source,’ he says. ‘Of course I’m going to be judged, I’m going to be scrutinised if I turn round and start rapping, or start DJing. But it all comes from the same source. The acting is more advanced, because that’s what I’ve been concentrating on. But I don’t overthink it because if I did, I just wouldn’t do it.’ ES